I am pleased to welcome you to the DVCon U.S. 2023 conference and exhibition! This is our first year back to an in-person conference, and I extremely excited to see everyone in person. Attendees can look forward to outstanding technical sessions and discussions on many hot topics, as well as networking during the breakout sessions and receptions,  and opportunities to preview the latest industry design and verification tools and services from the best in the industry.

We are proud of continuing our tradition of providing an annual technical forum that serves the needs of the practicing design and verification community, organized by dedicated volunteers from the community itself.

Now in its 35th year, DVCon U.S. has established itself as the must-attend industry and user-focused conference for design and verification engineers, EDA developers, IP integrators and design managers, focusing on design and verification of electronic systems and integrated circuits. We are proud that this conference attracts wide participation from the industry from the smaller to the larger companies throughout the program and exhibition.

Our four-day virtual program contains many key design and verification topics including RISC-V, cloud-based design, open source, formal verification, portable stimulus, IP security, UVM, functional safety, prototyping and emulation, SystemC, and many others. The event provides an opportunity to discuss challenges and solutions that can be beneficial in current and upcoming projects as electronic designs and verification complexities and challenges continue to increase exponentially. Attendees will find each of these areas addressed at the conference’s sessions, panels, posters, tutorials, and short workshops with an emphasis on solutions to engineers’ real-world problems.

We are pleased to offer attendees an in-depth technical program with a wide variety of choices. We received numerous outstanding submissions for papers, panels, tutorials, and short workshops from the best technical minds and organizations in the industry. Our focus on the users of Accellera standard EDA languages, tools, and methodologies continues to be a DVCon 2023 hallmark. Attendees can expect to learn about both practical solutions to their pressing problems and preview the technologies that will affect them in the near future.

I am pleased to present the work of the DVCon Steering Committee and Technical Program Committee, who have put together an excellent 2023 program with the support of our conference management specialists, Conference Catalysts.

Highlights of the conference include:

Accellera Day: On Monday, February 27, our conference sponsor, Accellera Systems Initiative, kicks off DVCon U.S. with Accellera Day. We will have a morning Accellera tutorial on the Portable Stimulus standard, as well as three Accellera short workshops presented by Accellera standards working group members throughout the day. We will have four sponsored short workshops in the afternoon presented by design verification industry members covering topics such as Mixed-Signal verification, power efficient systems, formal verification, and more.

Keynote: This year’s keynote, “What Do Farming, Steel, and Space Have in Common,” will be given by Dr. Dirk Didascalou, Chief Technology Officer at Siemens Digital Industries. In his presentation, Dr. Didascalou will discuss how discuss how digitalization is driving transformations in every part of life.

Technical papers and posters: Technical Program Chair, Josh Rensch, and Poster Chair, Tom Fitzpatrick, have organized an excellent technical program on Tuesday and Wednesday that includes papers and a new format for the Poster session. The Poster Ninja Warrior session will include four posters that will battle it out, with each presenter given five minutes to deliver.

We are very grateful for the outstanding submissions and the work done by the technical program committee volunteers to review the submissions and encourage the community to keep submitting. There are so many good choices that you will want to go through the program and review it thoroughly as you plan each day. There is something for everyone in this broad, in-depth technical program. With so many interesting options, we look forward to your votes for the best paper and best poster awards after the last program session on Wednesday.

Tutorials and Short Workshops: Xiaolin Chen, Tutorial and Short Workshop Chair, has put together an outstanding selection of tutorials and short workshops for Monday and Thursday. The short workshops are extremely popular and are intended to give more organizations, mostly smaller companies, greater opportunity to participate in the program and give attendees more variety in shorter educational and learning sessions. We have sponsored short workshops in this year’s program, on Monday and Thursday, covering a wide variety of topics.

We will have two sponsored tutorials on Thursday with topics covering: Effective Verification Management and XMODEL.

Panels: Ambar Sarkar, Panel Chair, has organized two interesting and thought-provoking panel sessions: “Systems are Evolving. Is Verification Keeping Up?” and “AI-ML Algorithms are Transforming Verification: Separating Hype from Reality.” Both panels will offer attendees an opportunity to ask questions during a live Q&A on the conference platform.

We invite all attendees to visit the Exhibition floor. It is an excellent way to connect with colleagues as well as learn about the latest products in the design and verification industry.

My sincere thanks to our program sponsor, Accellera Systems Initiative, industry sponsors, steering committee volunteers, technical program committee volunteers, past chairs and Conference Catalyst staff who have worked hard to put together a program that makes DVCon “the” conference for design and verification engineers.

I sincerely look forward to seeing you DVCon U.S. 2023!